1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to digital communication systems, and more particularly to a mechanism of metric generation for a baseband signal substantially received over a flat fading channel.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapidly growing demand for cellular mobile radio and other wireless transmission services, there has been an increasing interest in exploiting various technologies to provide reliable, secure, and efficient wireless communications. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a special case of multi-carrier transmission; it is well known as a highly spectral efficient transmission scheme capable of dealing with severe channel impairment encountered in a wireless environment. The basic idea of OFDM is to divide the available spectrum into several sub-channels (subcarriers). By making all sub-channels narrowband, they experience almost flat fading, which makes equalization very simple. To obtain a high spectral efficiency, the frequency responses of the sub-channels are overlapping and orthogonal. This orthogonality can be completely maintained by introducing a guard interval, even though the signal passes through a time-dispersive channel. A guard interval is a copy of the last part of the OFDM symbol which is pre-appended to the transmitted symbol. This makes the transmitted signal periodic, which plays a decisive role in avoiding inter-symbol and inter-carrier interference.
OFDM can largely eliminate the effects of inter-symbol interference (ISI) for high-speed transmission in highly dispersive channels by separating a single high speed bit stream into a multiplicity of much lower speed bit streams each modulating a different subcarrier. Moreover, the use of error coding, interleaving, and channel-state information (CSI) allows OFDM to function in a manner that is well suited to the needs of high-speed wired or wireless transmission. In order to combat frequency-selective fading and interference, channel coding with soft-decision decoding can be properly integrated with an OFDM system. Soft-decision decoding, in contrast to hard-decision, makes decisions on the information bits without making direct decisions about the transmitted symbols or codewords. In fact, this results in better performance. Since the soft-decision decoding significantly outperforms hard-decision decoding, it is preferable for use in wireless systems. In a soft-decision decoding algorithm, a measure or metric of the received signal must be defined and the metric is closely related to the modulation schemes. Accordingly, a bit metric needs to be made separately for each received bit to indicate a degree of confidence.
OFDM was previously adopted for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications as part of the IEEE 802.11a standard in the 5 GHz frequency band. In June of 2003, IEEE announced its final approval of the IEEE 802.11g standard which also adopted OFDM as a mandatory part for a further high-speed physical layer (PHY) extension to the 802.11b standard in the 2.4 GHz band. However, the existing mass-produced WLAN products are not very cost-effective. Several studies have shown that the system performance is heavily dependent on metric computation in the soft-decision decoding. Therefore, the method of calculating bit metrics is critical to system performance in WLAN receivers. Furthermore, soft-decision decoding makes the decoder more complex and difficult to implement. In view of the above, a novel scheme for calculating bit metrics in WLAN receivers unencumbered by the existing limitations is called for.